John Benjamins Publishing announces this new work in Pragmatics and
Discourse:
Responding in Conversation. A study of response particles in Finnish
Marja-Leena SORJONEN (Research Institute for the Languages of Finland)
Pragmatics & Beyond NS 70 2001. x, 330 pp. Hardcover
US & Canada: 1 55619 948 1 / USD 82.00
Rest of world: 90 272 5085 5 / EUR 90.00
This book concerns particles that are used as responses in
conversations. It provides much needed methodological tools for
analyzing the use of response particles in languages, while its
particular focus is Finnish. The book focuses on two Finnish
particles, nii(n) and joo, which in some of their central usages have
"yeah" and "yes" as their closest English counterparts. The two
particles are discussed in a number of sequential and activity
contexts, including their use as answers to yes-no questions and
directives, as responses to a stance-taking by the prior speaker, and
in the midst of an extended telling by the co-participant. It will be
shown how there is a fine-grained division of labor between the
particles, having to do with the epistemic and affective character of
the talk and the continuation vs. closure-relevance of the
activity. The book connects the interactional usages of the particles
with what is known about their historical origins, and in this fashion
it is also of interest to linguists doing research on processes of
grammaticalization and lexicalization.
John Benjamins Publishing Co.
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